40th Anniversary Review: Schindler's List

The book behind one of the most powerful stories of the Holocaust.

Author: Thomas Keneally

Originally Published: October 18th, 1982

Originally Published as Schindler’s Ark

There are some stories which practically the whole world seems to know. These tend to include the stories of Adam and Eve, the first Christmas, and Romeo and Juliet, among others. For Americans, the stories of the first Thanksgiving and the Revolutionary War can be added along to this, as well as the lives of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

Yet as many tend to learn by adulthood, there are often multiplesides to these stories. There are the popular and often simplified versions that we first hear about in elementary school and through certain forms of media, and then there are the more complex versions that we come to understand if we do additional research, such as reading biographies, watching documentaries, or doing close studies of the stories as they were originally written.

When it comes to the history of World War 2 and the Holocaust, one of such stories is that of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who started running a factory in Nazi-occupied Poland that took in many Jewish workers. At first, he was interested in this mainly to make a good profit, but upon becoming more aware of the cruelty of the more dedicated Nazis and the suffering the Jews were forced to go through, he became more dedicated to saving lives and by the end of the war, he managed to save about 1,200 Jews.

 Most of the world is aware of this story because of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1993 and has been used as a major resource for Holocaust education ever since. I first watched this film over a course of several days during a contemporary world history class that I took as a sophomore in high school, and I was deeply impressed and moved by it from the start, as I’m sure many who watch it for the first time can say.

However, the showing of the film along with some questions for which we were required to given written responses to was all we got in terms of class instruction about the story. There was no classroom discussion following it, no explanation of the things the film got right and what it left out, or additional information about how the story came to be told in the first place. We just watched the movie, did the required assigned questions, and then moved on to a brief unit on the Cold War. In fact, if I hadn’t noticed some of the additional information on the film’s story that was included in the packet our assigned questions came in, I would not have known much about how the true story differed from the film. And that might be the case with many people who watch the movie for the first time: they see it, are both moved and horrified by what they see, and then must move on without getting any further information about it.

So I’ll begin this review by saying that the first person to have gotten the story of Oskar Schindler out to the world was Irish Australian author Thomas Keneally. Prior to the publication of the book, he’d been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), Gossip from the Forest (1975), and Confederates (1979), but as was interestingly also the case with Spielberg and the Oscars, it was through Schindler’s List that he finally won the award in 1983, the same year he was named an Australian Living Treasure.

Keneally wrote the book after encountering Leopold and Mila Pfefferberg, two Holocaust survivors who were among the prisoners Oskar Schindler saved- known as Schindlerjuden - at the luggage store they ran in Beverly Hills, California just as he was waiting a Sunday-night plane heading to Australia. Starting around the final years of Oskar Schindler’s life, MGM had been attempted to make a film about him, and for this purpose Leopold had put together many original documents and photos from the Schindler years. It was through this information that Thomas Keneally was able to write this book.

It should also be noted that this story was written as a fictional novel based on true events. So while most of the individuals and events described in the story were real, they were written about in fictional ways, so sometimes what is said by certain people or how exactly an event took place may not fully correspond to what actually happened.

The novel begins with a prologue set in the autumn of 1943. We’re introduced to Oskar Schindler as he’s heading over to a dinner party where several Nazi officials were present in the Polish city of Cracow. We’re told that this was not a virtuous man in the customary sense, since he was living with a German mistress while his wife Emilie was living at Moravia and tended to drink a lot, especially during social gatherings with bureaucrats and SS men. And above all, despite what he would go on to do, he was still working within a system that was responsible for the oppression of many people. Because of this, his virtue was rather strange and unconventional.

Oskar was dining in the home of SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Amon Goeth, who ran the concentration camp of Plaszow. Along with him were Julian Scherner, head of the SS in Cracow, Rolf Czurda, chief of Cracow’s branch of the SD, and Franz Bosch, a veteran of the first World War and manager of several workshops within Plaszow. Oskar was said to have despised all of these people, yet there were two individuals whom he respected. They included Julius Madritsch, an enterprising yet humane man who ran a successful uniform factory in which many Jewish prisoners worked, and Raimund Titsch, an Austrian Catholic who was Madritsch’s manager and who smuggled truckloads of food for prisoners while also taking dozens of photographs of Nazis, prisoners, and what went on in Plaszow, although it would be decades before the reels including these photos would be developed.

While in the party, the men spoke how business was going, and Bosch at one point offended Oskar by asking how he was able to keep his wife off his back, but nothing really came from this. Meanwhile, they are accompanied by several women, music was played by the Rosner brothers, two Jewish prisoners who used to make a living as musicians, and they were all served food by Helen Hirsch, Amon’s Jewish maid, who had a noticeable purple bruise between her neck and shoulder.

Before leaving the party, Oskar went to see Helen Hirsch in the kitchen. At first, Helen feared his intentions, and was especially startled when he gave her a kiss. However, he assured her that he was kissing her out of pity and gave her a candy bar in case she needed extra food. She then started weeping and admitted that Amon would beat her, sometimes even in front of the women present at the party, and upon witnessing what he’d done to other prisoners, she became convinced that he’d eventually kill her too. But Oskar insisted this wouldn’t happen because Amon liked her, which was why she didn’t have to wear a gold star. He also promised to eventually have her out of there and into the factory he ran. Helen was unsure of this promise, but got a bit of hope over this assurance and his unexpected kindness towards her, so she asked if he could consider helping her sister as well, giving him money she’d kept hidden in exchange for this.

In the first chapter, we’ve given several details about the early life of Oskar Schindler. He was born on April 28th, 1908 in the Moravian province of the Austrian Empire and grew up in the city of Zwittau. His family, who were German-speakingCatholics, consisted of his father Hans, a businessman who led a lifestyle not so different from the one his son would develop as an adult, his mother Louisa, who was devoutly religious, and his sister Elfriede. While in school, Oskar took a course that was meant to prepare future engineers. He also gained an interest in riding motorcycles and at one point would drive around Zwittau on a red 500cc Galloni, an Italian motorcycle of which there were only four others in Europe outside of Italy. He participated in several motorcycle races with it, coming in third place in one of them and fourth place in another.

His interested in motorcycling came to an end upon marrying Emilie, a convent-educated girl from a village east of Zwiattu who lived with her widowed father. Neither of their two fathers approved of their marriage, with Hans Schindler disapproving due to how his son’s early marriage already reminded him so much of his own due to how similar Emilie was to his wife, while Emilie’s father refused to pay a full dowry to Oskar, giving him only a fraction of the half-million he owed.

Not long after, the Schindler family business went bankrupt, and Hans Schindler ended up divorcing Louisa. She died shortly after this, and despite how he himself was already being unfaithful to Emilie, Oskar would end up strongly resenting his father for what he’d done to his mother for a long time.

It’s said that by that time, Oskar had joined the Sudeten German Party and could be seen wearing a swastika, or a Hackenkreuz, as it was called in German. It’s stated that he most likely joined because he was an salesman and all young Czech Germans were doing it, with the only ones not joining being either Social Democrats or Communists, although it’s also stated that Emilie and his aunts didn’t really approve of this. But as far as anti-sematic attitudes, he did not appear to have any even early on. This was probably because he’d grown up being friends with some Jewish children from his German grammar school while also having a liberal rabbi as a next-door neighbor. It was the same with Emilie, who’d once been friends with a Jewish girl despite how the local priest, who’d been a friend of her father’s, had told her that a Catholic girl shouldn’t be friends with Jews.

But regardless, Oskar still had an interest in profiting from business opportunities that were arising on account of the war. During a party taking place in a sanitarium, he’d met with a German named Eberhard Gebauer, who later identified himself as an officer of the Abwehr intelligence and offered Oskar the opportunity to work for the foreign section of the Abwehr, where he could observe industrial and military instillations as well as German Poles which he could recruit through restaurants, bars, or business meetings. He agreed to this and showed a gift for getting news out of people through social gatherings and his charming personality during his trips to Poland, and came to especially like the city of Cracow.

In October 1939, two German officials were appointed to start taking over a Jewish-run business called J.C. Bucheister and Company. Earlier on the same day they’d come in, a German NCO had paid for expensive cloth using antique currency. And now, the NCO accused the Jewish bookkeeper of substituting this valueless money for hard Zloty (Polish currency) and threatened to call the police. The other German official, Sepp Aue (whose grandmother was Jewish), was more concerned about the bookkeeper being imprisoned, and so he sent a message to the company’s original accountant, Itzhak Stern, to come to the office and attempt to settle this conflict. Around the same time as he sent the message through an office boy, his secretary told him that Oskar Schindler, whom he’d met at a party the night before, was outside and claiming to have an appointment. Oskar had told him then that he was seeking a career in Cracow, and Aue said he was welcome to look over Bucheister’s.

After Aue asked him about his connections, they found Itzhak Stern at the office, looking sick due to having influenza, but still ready to have a look at the situation at hand. And once Aue explains it further, he allowed Oskar, who was in need of local information, to speak with Stern. As a sort of test to see how willing he’d be to work with a Jew, Stern suggested speaking with officials from the Trust Agency, to which Oskar responded by saying they were thieves and bureaucrats, and he tended to be a capitalist by temperament and therefore disliked being regulated. With this said, they went on with their meeting, with Stern giving information about the many factories in Cracow, including one called Rekord, which had made enamelware and was currently in bankruptcy, and for which Oskar asked Stern to go over the balance sheets. Because enamelware was close to the field in which Oskar worked for, he expressed interest in leasing it through the commercial court.

Throughout this conversation, Stern was trying to see if Oskar was the sort of German he could trust. It had been seven weeks since the German occupation of Poland, and Jews were already being required to wear yellow stars and have registration cards with yellow stripes on them, so it was reasonable to show concern. However, Oskar remained rather easy going during their conversation, without showing any of the prejudices towards Jewish people that other Germans might have expressed. In fact, towards the end of their meeting, Oskar brought up how Christianity had its base in Judaism, and because Stern had written about comparative religion for journals before, this interested him despite Oskar’s rather basic knowledge on the subject. And when Oskar brought up how he wouldn’t like to be a priest during a time when life had less value than a pack of cigarettes, Stern told him that the reference he’d made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse saying that “he who save the life of one man saves the entire world.”

Once Oskar took over Rekord, it was renamed Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik, although it was often referred to as Emalia. At the start, there were forty-five employees who worked with kitchenware. By seeking out various businessmen and Nazi and military officials, often at social gatherings, he managed to expand on it and get much of what he needed to run it throughout the war. He also became involved in the black market with help from Leopold Pfefferberg, a former physical education teacher who’d also been in the Polish Army for a while.  By the midsummer of 1940, he was employing 250 Poles in this factory, and because Stern would often call on him to arrange employment for young Jews, he soon had 150 Jewish workers as well, resulting in the factory gaining a small reputation as a haven for Jews early on.

However, things weren’t always easy for him. He was arrested on two different occasions. The first time, it was for his involvement in the black market, but he ended up being released very easily. The second time was on his thirty- fourth birthday in 1942 when he’d kissed a Jewish woman as his factory workers were celebrating with him. This time, he was kept in jail a bit longer, sharing a cell with an officer who was openly contemptuous towards those in power. Although he was still released after a few days, they were harder on him due to how he’d violated laws concerning racial purity.

Things also continued getting harder for the Jewish people of Cracow. Government General Hans Frank, despite not liking the strong power the Germans had gained over the city, despised the Jews just as much the Nazis did. He didn’t like how so many Jews were being brought to Cracow from other cities and thought that the best way to solve this issue would be to a single vast concentration camp either in the city of Lublin or somewhere much further away, such as the island of Madagascar, as the Polish government had been looking into it since 1937 in the hopes of creating a grand export market. SS officials would break into the apartments of Jewish people and take any valuables they had with them, while Einsatz squads would target those in synagogues, sometimes bringing over less religious Jews and gathering them with more Orthodox Jews and doing things to make them test their faith, such as spitting on a Torah scroll, and then shooting everyone regardless of what they did.

By 1940, Governor General Frank started making plans that were meant to make Cracow free of Jews. 5000 to 6000 skilled Jewish workers would be allowed to remain, while all the rest would be moved into other cities such as Warshaw, Lublin, or Czestochowa. Because of this, agents within groups known as the Judenrat, or Jewish Councils, would organize lists of Germans whom they could appeal to. This list included Oskar Schindler as well as Julius Madritsch, who would go on to make a bigger fortune from it than Oskar did with his own factory.

Not long after, Jewish people started being required to live in ghettos. Many cooperated in this because their people had been accustomed to similar separation from gentiles in the past, and they thought they might eventually be allowed to carry on with their lives this way. In Cracow, the ghetto had its own newspaper, postage stamps, and a restaurant. Because of this, some thought they could eventually have schooling for their children once again and orchestras that could perform on a regular basis, meaning they could remain this way permanently.

But any hopes of this turned out being false. One day around 1943, after Oskar and his mistress Ingrid had been riding horses through the woods, they witnessed an Aktion, where the SS and OD were taking Jewish people out of their homes while others ended up beaten or shot in the streets. One of the people that got the most interest out of Oskar was a little girl who was dressed all in red, who could be seen around a line of women and children. It stuck out to him because this seemed to make a statement, the way many children do when it comes to colors. Her name was Genia and who’d been under the care of her uncle, Dr. Idek Schindel, while her parents were in hiding in the countryside. Not long after seeing her, Oskar and Ingrid witnessed an SS officer shoot a woman with a boy by her side just as Genia was watching. Oskar had been horrified that they’d been willing to let a child see what they were doing, but he soon came to understand that they’d done this because they thought any witnesses of their actions, children included, would soon perish. Genia managed to return to her uncle (and despite what was shown in the film, ultimately survived the war), but this event still was reported to have led Oskar to become much more dedicated to saving lives and defeating the system.

After this incident, many of the Jews of Cracow were kept in the concentration camp of Plaszow, which was run by Amon Goeth, a Viennese man. He’s described as being not that different from Oskar Schindler, having been born the same year as him, with an academic background in the sciences, a massive physique, being prone to drinking a lot and to sexual promiscuity and having also been brought up Catholic, although he ceased being observant after his first marriage ended. However, he was much more brutal with other people than Oskar was, with a tendency to beat women- both of his wives claiming he’d been physically abusive- and being just as brutal towards the Jewish prisoners. He would often go out from the balcony of his villa and shoot prisoners for no particular reason from there, and had prisoners killed for any little misdeed. During one of his first acts of cruelty, he had a woman who’d been an engineer killed because she’d been commanding workers to get things done a certain way.  This showed those who worked for him that instant execution was the way things prisoners would be dealt with in Plaszow.

During that time, the Jewish prisoners did many things both out of desperation and courage. One doctor referred to as Dr. H decided to euthanize his sick patients so that they wouldn’t have to go through a brutal death in the hands of the Nazis, a boy hid in the latrines in order to avoid a mass execution that was taking place, while Henry Rosner, one of Amon’s musicians, was once asked to play “Gloomy Sunday”, a song associated with suicide back in the 1930s, for an officer who ended up killing himself just as he played, and Mitek Pemper would be required by Amon to write up documents detailing the activities and deaths performed by the Nazis. Various other individuals just narrowly avoided being killed on several occasions. On a brighter note, a young woman named Rebecca, who worked for Amon as a manicurist and witnessed the abuse Helen Hirsh had to go through, found love with a fellow prisoner and the two of them managed to get married in secret within the camp.

Likewise, Oskar Schindler did much more for the prisoners. To get more prisoners to work for him, he’d document them as individuals who’d worked in industrial fields. Once someone tried to shoot one of the workers at Emalia who didn’t appear to be productive, and Oskar stopped him from doing so. He also started getting in contact with individuals working from Budapest who wanted to become aware of what the Jewish people were going through at the hands of the Nazis, and he was able to provide them with valuable information regarding the inhumane treatment they were experiencing. Through his many meetings with Nazi officials and the deals he continued making through the black market, he was able to obtain enough food for prisoners and keep many of them from being executed. Also, a year after he promised to get Helen Hirsh into his factory (an earlier attempt at doing so had been denied by Amon Goeth), he played a card game with Amon to see which of them would be able to keep her. He’d played well enough and managed to finally get her. However, there were times when he didn’t do enough for others, such as on one occasion when a woman requested to have her parents brought over to the factory and he objected to this. So despite all he did for many people, there were still a few whom he turned down.

In 1944, Oskar got permission to move the factory to Czechoslovakia, where it was settled around Zwittau and named Brinnlitz. Before going, he and Raimund Titsch put together a list of all those who worked for him, which included around 800 men and 300 women.  However, before they were placed in the new factory, both the men and women were sent to concentration camps. They were all eventually brought to Brinnlitz, but it took longer to get the women in than it did for the men. Luckily, none of them died during their time in the concentration camp, but it’s noted that during their time in Brinnltiz, they did not provide as satisfactory an output as they did in Cracow; the women would mostly knit, while children could sometimes be seen playing around. This got the attention of certain Nazi officials, who did inspections of the factory as a result. However, Oskar continued running the factory the way he wanted to, and things remained quite similar for the prisoners as they’d been in Emalia.

Around this time, Emilie, who’d stayed behind when her husband was in Poland and only occasionally visited him, became involved in helping the prisoners as well by preparing food, looking after those who were sick, and assisting with trading goods. She did most of her work quietly, leading some to think she was simply a submissive wife, but those who needed her help were usually the ones to noticed just how much she did, including helping those who were dying gain more strength by feeding them and arranging for someone that was visiting Cracow to help get the broken glasses of a prisoner fixed because the prescription for them was still in that city, with the latter being considered more than an average act of kindness due to how it was considered better if Jews weren’t able to see well. It’s noted that “One wonders if some of Emilie’s kindnesses in this matter may not have been absorbed into the Oskar legend, the way the deeds of minor heroes have been subsumed by the figure of Arthur or Robin Hood,” which the importance of those who play minor roles in the lives of legendry figures, as turned out being the case with Emilie.

By the time of Oskar’s thirty-seventh birthday, it was clear that the Germans were going to lose the war and the Nazis would soon lose their power. On that day, he made a speech about how the great tyranny was coming to an end, and spoke as if the SS men were just as much victims of the system as the Jews were. He also promised to stay in Brinnlitz until the end of hostilities was announced. The prisoners took it as one of his usual promises of a future for them, while it’s said that the SS men were most likely offended by this speech because of how he’d insulted their corps. But despite how valiant he’d sounded during this speech, Oskar was concerned over the Russian army taking control over the area because of how they were said to be dangerous when dealing with their enemies. In the days that followed, Liepold, one of the SS men in charge of that area, was transferred to an infantry battalion near Prague, while the prisoners worked harder than usual.

On May 7th, Oskar received news of the German surrender through the BBC radio in the early hours of the day. Around noon, the speech Winston Churchill made was played through the loudspeakers of the factory so that all the prisoners were made aware that the war in Europe was officially over. As was the case on his birthday, Oskar made a speech for all the prisoners, and it ended up being recorded by two women who knew shorthand. He said that after six years of cruel murder, he wanted to turn to them for order and discipline so that they’d be able to return to their homes and look for any survivors from their families and therefore prevent any panic that might arise. He also stated that there were many Germans who only on that day had become aware of the horrors they’d had to go through, so they should act humane way and leave justice to those were authorized to carry it out. He also said the following:

“Don’t thank me for your survival. Thank your people who worked day and night to save you from extermination. Thank your fearless Stern and Pemper and a few others who, thinking of you and worrying about you, especially in Cracow, have faced death every moment. The hour of honor makes it our duty to watch and keep order, as long as we stay here together. I beg of you, even among yourselves, to make nothing but humane and just decisions. I wish to thank my personal collaborators for their complete sacrifice in connection with my work.”

After this speech was given, Oskar was given a ring by the prisoners that included the quote from the Talmud which Stern had shared with him years before. Later, he and Emilie left the factory site dressed in prisoner’s uniforms while accompanied by eight prisoners. They would travel as far as Switzerland and Germany, and along the way would meet up with American soldiers and French Swiss officials who regarded them with some suspicion at first, with the latter arresting and questioning them on who they were, but who all went on to honor and assist them upon learning about what they’d been through, and the journey ended in Germany.

In Cracow, Amon Goeth, who had been arrested in 1944 by the Nazis for being involved in the black market, was put on trial for what he’d done at the concentration camps. Several former prisoners gave testimonies of his brutal behavior and what he’d put them through, including Pemper, Dr. Beiberstein, and Helen Hirsh. Amon claimed that most of his actions had been done because of what was required of him by others and showed little remorse for his deeds, and he was executed in 1946.

 Oskar and Emilie Schindler remained in Germany until 1949, when they moved to Argentina and Oskar attempted to start a nutria breeding farm. However, this business failed, and around 1958, he went back to Germany and left Emilie behind. He then attempted to start a cement factory in Frankfurt, but this business failed as well. To make matters worse, there were people there who were openly contemptuous over what he’d done for the Jewish people for the war. He’d get jeered in the streets, told that he should have burned along with the Jews that had been killed the war, and he once punched a worker who called him a “Jew Kisser” and was forced to pay a fee over this. He was left in a bad state over this both financially and emotionally, and he had to rely on support from the Schindlerjuden for the rest of his life. Likewise, Raimund Titsch was listed as a traitor by a secret society of former SS men known as ODESSA and would get similar threats as Oskar did in the streets of Vienna. In November of 1963, as he was suffering from heart disease, Leopold Pfefferberg secretly bought the box of Plaszow reels he’d kept hidden for twenty years for $500, and Titsch requested that the reels not be developed until after his death due to his deep fear of ODESSA.

However, Oskar was honored for his work in the war on several occasions. In 1961, the year he went bankrupt from the cement factory, Schindlerjuden living in Israel invited him to come visit at their expense. He was welcomed by both survivors and their children, and because this visit fell around the same time as the famous Adolf Eichmann trial, it drew some attention from the international press, meaning that the world was somewhat aware of what he’d done by that time. On his fifty-third birthday, he unveiled a plaque in the Park of Heroes in Tel Aviv, which described him as the savior of 1,200 individuals, and ten days later, he was declared a Righteous Person in Jerusalem, a title based on the old assumption that the God of Israel always provided a handful of just men among gentiles. He also had a tree planted in the Avenue of the Righteous around a museum, in which trees for Julius Madritsch and Raimund Titsch could also be found. He also often did work for several officials and organizations in trying to track down former Nazis who had yet to be brought to justice.

In October 1974, after having been ill for some time, he collapsed in his apartment in Frankfurt, dying in a hospital on October 9th of a seizure caused by the advanced hardening in the arteries of the brain and heart. Because he’d stated in his will that he wished to be buried in Jerusalem, a Franciscan priest in Jerusalem gave permission for him to be buried in the Latin Cemetery of Jerusalem, a Catholic cemetery, just two weeks after his death. A month later, he was buried in this cemetery, which looked south of a valley known as Gehenna in the New Testament. Among those present during the procession from the Old City of Jerusalem to the Latin Cemetery included Itzhak Stern, Mosche Bejski, Helen Hirsh, Jakob Sternberg, and Juda Dresner. Keneally ends the novel by stating “He was mourned on every continent.”

If there’s anything I took away from reading this novel, it’s that there’s always more to well-known stories of real- life events or historical figures than you might have originally been aware of. There’s always bound to be information that’s either added to popular narratives or that is left out, whether it concerns what exactly happened during certain events, the roles played by individuals that were involved, and how they might have felt about what they’d experienced. Just as interesting are people’s interpretations of the people and events concerned, like whether certain individuals can be considered heroes or flawed people or if an event symbolized positive or negative change for the future.

When it comes to Schindler’s List, one thing that probably comes to many people’s minds is how we should view Oskar Schindler as a person. There are many who see him as a hero due to how he’d managed to save many Jewish people at a time when many individuals were trying to exterminate them; they often recognize how he started out mainly interested in benefitting from wartime opportunities but recognize that he went on to become more devoted to saving lives once he became more aware of the cruelty of the Nazis and what they put the Jewish people through. However, others might see him as an opportunist who benefitted from an inhumane regime by running a place that could have been the site of brutal slavery under different circumstances and believe that he was more of an accidental hero than anything else. And many might point out his other flaws, like his constant adultery and drinking habits, as reasons why people shouldn’t be too quick to consider him a good person.

Personally, I think we should acknowledge Oskar Schindler’s heroic deeds while still recognizing his flaws. One of the things I came to appreciate, and felt quite assured in, when reading this was that Oskar truly comes across as someone who wasn’t antisemitic. We’re told that he’d grown up alongside Jewish people, and he comes across as quite fair when interacting with Stern during their first meeting, even acknowledging some of his religious knowledge in respectful ways. Even when he did join the Nazi Party, he did so mainly because men had to join in order to hold a position in society; he never really embraced the political ideology behind it. And in a time and place where many despised Jewish people and easily gave in to the Nazis, this comes across as being exceptionally good.

However, we can’t ignore the fact that he still profited from a system responsible for so much suffering and death for years, nor his constant adultery. I think it’s wise to take into consideration what Thomas Keneally said about virtue at the beginning of the story and remember that there are many ways in which people can show virtue, and that no hero is without flaws. This applies just as much to Oskar Schindler as it does to many other historical figures that we’re always hearing about. It could be easy to simply condemn such individuals, but knowing the amount of good that came about in this case and the fact that Oskar tended to dislike many of the Nazis he had to make negotiations with, even longing for the death of Hitler where there was news of his assassination attempt at one point in the story- thinking it could mean the end of the brutal system he and the prisoners were being subjected to-, this is not the right thing to do. It’s better to learn more about such individuals for ourselves and understand how the unique circumstances they lived under may have prompted some of their actions than it is to come to simple conclusions over who they are and what their legacy should be.

There’s also the way the Steven Spielberg film chose to tell the story in comparison to what the book did. There are several things that remain the same, such as the equal focus on Oskar and the Nazis and the Schindlerjuden, the depictions of the atrocities the Jewish people were forced to go through, and how Oskar’s dedication to saving people increased over time. Making the film in black and white felt like a good choice because it captures the despairing atmosphere of the time while also making viewers feel as if they were watching a film made during that era. It especially reminds me of Casablanca, where a man must take a stand against the Nazis after trying to remain neutral in war politics as he’s running a place in Morocco which serves people from many nations, a plot that seems similar in some ways to what we see in this story.

However, as was the case with The Color Purple, Spielberg didn’t include certain elements that would have made the film come across as more complex while adding things that felt a little too sentimental or even outright deceptive. For one thing, we don’t see the way some of the Jews turned their backs on their own people in the film. For instance, in the book, the members of the Judenrat changed from including individuals that wanted to make things easier for the Jewish people within the ghettos at the start to including stricter members later on, who were mostly Orthodox Jews that enforced the rules more stirctly as time went on, and during the part where Oskar and Ingrid were watching Jews being taken from their homes and shot in the streets, there were actually some Jews who were beating up other Jewish people. By not including this, viewers aren’t able to see how difficult times and widespread discrimination made some people so desperate for survival that they were willing to turn against each other, and that this happened even within horrific situations like the Holocaust.

Another change made was in the depiction of Emilie Schindler. In the film, we only seem to see her towards the beginning of the film and then towards the end as Oskar is preparing to flee from the factory. And during both these appearances, she seems to be merely in the background, rarely saying anything and simply remaining by her husband’s side, making it come across as if she really was simply a submissive wife. While such a portrayal would have been somewhat accurate during the beginning, when she’d only see Oskar during occasional visits to Poland, it’s not at all accurate later, when she dedicated much of her time to preparing food, looking after sick prisoners, and doing often small but meaningful things that helped prisoners get by.

Thinking back on the quote Kennealy included on those who help the legends, this is unfortunately a case where the small yet important work of an individual in the background went unrecognized, a fact that come across as even more sad when realizing that Emile spent much of her later years living in poverty in Argentina after Oskar left her. Spielberg could have done a major favor for her by depicting what she’d done for the Jews but chose not to for some reason. Because of this, erasing her role in the story feels disingenuous and comes across as one of many examples of how women’s roles throughout history are often minimized or forgotten.

Just as questionable was the way the fate of the girl in the red coat was shown in the film. Now, I did think the scene where she appears walking through the streets, with her coat being the only thing displaying any color throughout most of the movie, is very effective. Spielberg said it was meant to symbolize the United States and how they didn’t do enough to help the Jewish people of Europe before the war started, yet I think it could also symbolize the innocence of children and how they can be some of the only glimmers of hope during difficult times. Being able to see this and the way it impacted Oskar in the film was certainly one of the movie’s greatest strengths.

However, what I didn’t like was how in one scene where they are burning the bodies of dead prisoners, the girl’s red coat can be seen, implying that she must have died. As I mentioned before, in real life, the girl survived the war, going on to write a book at some point after the film was released telling her story. Even if the girl in the film wasn’t supposed to be fully based on Genia, including such a scene strongly suggesting that she’d died in the Holocaust comes across as an unnecessary and disrespectful attempt at sentimentality at the cost of making audiences believe that someone who’s alive and well died under such tragic circumstances. I would advise anyone working on putting together true stories to never do anything like this. If there’s anything people deserve to know the truth about when watching films based on true events, it’s whether the individuals being depicted in the film survived through certain hardships they went through or not. Creators owe it to the individuals and their loved ones to always be truthful about this.

Overall though, I still think the film Schindler’s List is worth watching so long as people are able to inform themselves at least a little about the true story, and the book certainly helps you appreciate the story much more. I would strongly advise any educators sharing this film with their students to not simply show them the film, as was the case when I watched it years ago, but to also inform them about the actual individuals and events it depicted. This could be done either through in-depth discussions, watching supplemental videos, or reading excerpts from the novel. There should also be an effort to include other material in which students can get the perspectives of Jewish people who were directly impacted by Holocaust, including Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl or the memoir Night. Because as good as it may be to know about Germans who helped Jews during the war, it’s still true that many were still committed to Nazi ideology and made things difficult for the Jewish people, so the more we can learn about the Jewish perspective and how tragic things really were for many people, the more educated we can become about this horrific time in history.

And as we’ve seen throughout recent history and even in the present, neither prejudices against certain people nor the capacity to start genocide of groups of individuals have completely gone away. While it might not be possible to completely do away with hate in this world, what we can always do is attempt to see those around us who are different from ourselves as humans who deserve as much dignity and respect as we do. If any conflict is to ever arise due to disagreements, we must remind ourselves of this and always act accordingly. It would also do us much good to remember what certain sources of wisdom tell us, which could include the Talmudic verse from this story or what’s often referred to as the golden rule of always treating others as you want to be treated. If we keep them in mind while making sure to always treat people fairly, perhaps we could see more positive change in this world.